Law: Testing The Boundaries

But in its quest for an isolated enclave where members could
maintain their religious and cultural traditions with less en-
croachment by the modern world, the sect has been thrust into the
national spotlight as the focus of a U.S. Supreme Court case about the
separation of church and state. "It's all very ironic,'' Silberstein
says, "because this community has made an effort to stay out of the
news.''

At issue is a 1989 law passed by the New York state legislature that
created a public school district with boundaries identical to those of
Kiryas Joel. The village, which now numbers about 12,000 and is still
growing, was incorporated in 1977 as a community separate from the
nearby town of Monroe. In signing the bill into law, Gov. Mario Cuomo
called the creation of the district a practical solution to an
"intractable problem'' that had vexed Kiryas Joel residents and
educators from the surrounding Monroe-Woodbury district for several
years: how best to provide educational services to the many disabled
children who live in the village.

The new school district, which essentially consists of a single
cinder-block building in the center of the community, has been "the
liberator of all those children,'' says Abraham Weider, president of
the Kiryas Joel school board. "Those children have been neglected for
years.''

But almost immediately, the law was challenged as an
unconstitutional concession to the demands of a religious group. "This
is the state of New York handing over the reins of government to a
theocratic community,'' says Louis Grumet, executive director of the
New York State School Boards Association, who as a taxpayer filed the
suit. One of the main arguments against the district is that the
precedent it sets could lead to a proliferation of similar religious
districts. "Within New York state alone, there are several other
compact Hasidic communities,'' Grumet says. "There is no reason
Williamsburg [in Brooklyn] couldn't constitute one school
district.''

State courts in New York have agreed with Grumet, including the
state's highest court, which ruled 4-2 last year that the law violates
the U.S. Constitution because its primary purpose is to advance
religion. Last fall, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case,
Board of Education of the Kiryas Joel Village School District vs.
Grumet, and in March it heard oral arguments.

The streets that wind around the typical suburban houses and
apartments of Kiryas Joel reveal little about the history of the people
who live there. The Satmar Hasidim are among the most conservative of
several sects of Orthodox Jews that have many members in the New York
City area. They strictly follow the teachings of the Torah and draw a
border between themselves and the rest of society with their
distinctive dress and the use of Yiddish as their primary language. Men
dress in special black garments, and their sons wear yarmulkes and long
side curls known as pais. Satmar women must wear hats or scarves, and
their daughters must wear long dresses or skirts. Pants, makeup, and
perfume are forbidden.

Many of the men commute to New York City to work as bookkeepers or
salesmen at jobs that do not require a college education. The Satmar
forbid higher education; it offers too much of an exposure to the
secular world. While members of the sect may have begun migrating from
Brooklyn for some of the same reasons other city dwellers move to the
suburbs, the difference is that they "moved whole cloth,'' says Samuel
Heilman, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at the Graduate
Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. "They
want to be in the suburbs, but not of the suburbs.''

On this early spring day, mothers push baby carriages through the
remaining winter slush to the village's only retail center, which
includes two kosher groceries. Several stop to chat outside a drugstore
promoting a special on Pampers. Obeying a religious command to be
fruitful, Satmar women typically bear as many as 10 children.

The Satmar have built several private yeshivas, or religious
schools, for the education of the approximately 5,000 nondisabled
children in Kiryas Joel. But the village has struggled over how to
educate the scores of children who have serious disabilities, such as
Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and spina bifida. "The magnitude of cost
for a community that is as poor as ours is impossible to bear,'' says
Weider of the school board. The village's median income is about
$14,700, well below the statewide median of $33,000.

Teachers from Monroe-Wood- bury used to provide special education
services to these village children in an annex to one of the yeshivas.
But that ended in 1985, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was
unconstitutional for public school teachers to provide services on the
grounds of religious schools. The MonroeWoodbury district refused to
provide special education at a neutral site within Kiryas Joel,
insisting that the village children ride buses to other schools in the
region. A few Satmar parents complied, but most balked because they did
not want to expose the children to the outside world.

Because so few Kiryas Joel residents were sending their disabled
children to the MonroeWoodbury system, state lawmakers created the
separate district. Facing skeptical state education officials, the
village hired Steven Benardo, the top special education administrator
in the Bronx, as its first superintendent.

As he leads a tour of the building, Benardo explains that the school
now serves about 220 students with a wide range of disabilities. In one
room, therapists help a child with a traumatic brain injury learn to
use a computer communications device. In another, teachers show several
girls from the yeshiva how to care for younger siblings with Down
syndrome. "It's very beneficial to have the babies' sisters involved at
the school because they are often a primary care-giver at home,'' says
teacher Barbara Boss.

None of the teaching professionals employed by the district is
Hasidic, but several mothers from Kiryas Joel help out as teachers'
aides and clerical workers. Although boys and girls are segregated in
the religious schools, the Satmar have accepted mixing in the public
school, where boys sometimes are taught by women and girls by men.

By law, Kiryas Joel is a full-fledged public school district, so
Benardo has tried to introduce the community to a variety of other
educational services. For example, the district has established mobile
classrooms outside the girls' religious school for Chapter 1 and other
compensatory education services. The leaders of the boys' yeshiva have
not yet embraced such services, but Benardo is working on them. "We
have needed to explain ourselves to the community,'' he says.

If some local residents remain skeptical about the expanding role of
the school district, others still need to be convinced that it should
exist at all. One group of residents called the Committee for the
Well-Being of Kiryas Joel has even filed a friend-of-thecourt brief
with the Supreme Court, arguing that the local school board is under
the effective control of the sect's religious leader, Grand Rabbi Moses
Teitelbaum, who lives in Brooklyn. "There is no democracy here
whatsoever,'' says Joseph Waldman, a dissident resident who
unsuccessfully ran for the school board in 1989, coming in last behind
a slate that he contends was handpicked by the grand rabbi.

School board president Weider disputes that charge. "Let me assure
you that the grand rabbi has nothing to do with the school district,''
he says. "The real issue is the constitutional rights of these helpless
children to get an education.''--Mark Walsh

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